Artystyczna biografia i świat rzeźby Igora Mitoraja
The Artistic Biography of Igor Mitoraj and the World of His Art

Summary/Abstract: This reconstruction of the artistic biography of Igor Mitoraj combines assorted facts from his life with the artist’s self-commentary, i.e. their subjective interpretations borrowed from the interviews, which he gave and from the scarce texts, which he wrote. In those interviews Mitoraj spoke about his oeuvre, recalled certain events from his life, and revealed his attitude towards other sculptors. May this subjective-objective story about the artist’s life, the path leading from Cracow to imaginary Ithaca, described in this chapter, simultaneously perform the part of an initial and most general introduction to the secrets of Mitoraj’s oeuvre as a sculptor. In reviews, whose fragments are cited in the essay, Mitoraj explained the mysterious operations, incomprehensible at first glance, to which he subjected his works, such as the significance attached to bandaging the faces of his statues or the meaning of the rectangular gashes on their bodies, which he called “cuts”. For a researcher dealing with Mitoraj’s works, such a self-commentary and self-interpretation comprise a valuable contribution to reconstructing the artist’s creative process, the recreation of the universum of his imagination, the reestablishment of the paths of analogies and associations, and the process of becoming familiar with the applied sculptural and painting techniques (encaustic painting) – in a word, a prefatory and most comprehensive introduction to the world of the art of Igor Mitoraj.

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